What if you could do grad school again?

My second D-school and notes for my younger self.

It was 2017 and I was at a point in my career where I was looking for my next professional challenge. Around the same time, I married my long-time partner. We had been long distancing for more than three years. He was in Boston where he was completing his Ph.D. and is still as I write this post :D.

Getting a work visa outside India is complicated and I was eager to try something exciting in a very supportive environment. The next best option was to join grad school. Reluctantly, I agreed to the idea and started searching for what that might look like for me since I had completed D-school in India 3 years back.

This put me in an interesting situation, I now had gained knowledge and work experience in the field of UX design and research. I had to find a school that was offering me to grow my skills beyond what I knew and challenge me in my rather routine life back then. My husband who was doing his Ph.D. at Northeastern University had met folks from this new program called the Information Design and Visualization program and recommended I check out the work they were doing.

I was fortunate to meet some professors, including Prof. Dietmar Offenhuber and Prof. Pedro Cruz with whom I completed my graduate thesis, from the department to learn more. I was impressed by this mix of science, computing, art, and design projects that the program was encouraging its students to do. Not just that, the passion in the faculty for the problems they were solving were infectious.

No brainer, I applied to the program and got with the university academic scholarship. I was given this opportunity to go through D-school all over again and this is the advice I would give my younger self to keep in mind –

Gain some professional experience before entering D-school

While the circumstances were different the first time I went to D-school after under-graduation — I had a background in Electronics and Communication.
I had no idea what design was and I was simply switching professions. This time, I knew exactly what I was getting into, what my strengths and weaknesses were as a designer. My professional experience had given me confidence a sense of time management, planning, and maturity that would be helpful in getting the best out of any graduate school experience, especially in design when so much of proactiveness is demanded from the students.

Choose a D-school that adds value to your existing knowledge

You will be spending a lot of time and money if you plan to study abroad (especially in US). You will be sacrificing meeting your parents and friends and everything that is familiar to you back in India. Cities like Boston are expensive so you will be degrading your quality of life from what you had back in India, with more “do it yourself” added to every aspect of your lifestyle. If you are making this choice in the pursuit of learning, better make it worthwhile by finding a program that helps you grow exponentially from where you started. For example, my reason for joining a data visualization program and not a typical MS HCI program was to learn to work on complex data problems and get better at visual design, programming, and data wrangling. Also, it is wise not to take up programs that you can learn by yourself or in a professional environment.

Set a goal, work backwards

My goal when entering college was to expand my skill set and to experiment with a variety of different types of projects. More importantly, I wanted to diversify the problem space I was working on. With every class I took I was trying something new. For example in my information design class, I experimented with creating illustrations for visual storytelling to convey layers of travel information. Similarly, in my Geographical Information systems class, I was visualizing ways in which Boston could could promote active transportation in it’s current infrastructure. In fact, in one studio session I was able to merge the complexity of D3.js with geolocation data and Delaunay triangulations to create data portraits. I never thought I will venture into computational yet abstract data art.

Learn to code and build products

Coding is tough, and this comes from me having completed an undergraduate program in electronics engineering. I took two data visualization tools classes in which I built visualizations using p5.js, D3.js, and other web markup tools. The ramp-up to get the results I wanted was tough and I don’t think I have the speed or acumen to continue to code. However, that experience has made me a better designer and I empathize with my fellow engineering team members. It is so much easier to sketch things out on a piece of paper or create a mockup but building things is HARD and is very IMPORTANT. Your designs are as good as they were built and you should do everything you can to help build things to the best possible outcome.

Learn to work with large data, numbers, (and visualizations)

Data is being generated all around digital products. Data is being used to take design and business decisions. Being able to look at data and its representation is important to call out BS when you see it. If a designer is comfortable with basic statistics and data visualizations then he/she can have several benefits. First, it helps if you are working on products that use data visualization to convey information. Second, you can better plan and understand data from quantitative usability studies. Third, it helps you better read telemetry data from how users are using your products (this can be very helpful when working on consumer products like e-commerce websites). Finally, you can better understand and speak the language of business –You can talk about usage metrics and better understand data-driven business decisions that are made on market research numbers. Overall, it helps with generally broadening the mind and looking at things critically.

Document your work

Can’t stress how important this is even though I have talked about this earlier. As a student designer, you are in a very unique situation where you can showcase all your work without any hassles of NDAs that come along with showcasing your process and exposing to future employers and collaborators how your mind works and how you solve problems. Student life is a great time to create a habit of documentation you have smaller projects with well-defined scopes, you get breaks after each semester to catch up on documentation and getting things up on your portfolio. I would even create the artifacts for the project such that they could go into my web portfolio after completion of the project.

Seek to work on exciting projects

The F1 student visa comes with many restrictions including working only on-campus jobs and with a cap on the hourly stipend. I would consider myself very fortunate that I was able to get paid design jobs starting from my first semester of grad school all the way till the end. I would say my proactiveness in reaching out to professors and my prior experience had a role to play. But it was more about my desire to try anything that was thrown at me. I ended up making illustrations for children’s stories for a research lab, working on a speculative design project for re-imaging the future of the fishing industry, created a visualization of AI + Ethics literature for Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and society, and even did some data wrangling in R for a visualization project using census data. In addition to this, I was able to take up passion projects because I did not have the stress of a first time design student seeking a job. For my master’s thesis, I created “Visualizations in the Indian classical dance of Kathak”. This was a homage to my love for dance, design and science. I don’t think I would have been able to work on such a project during my first design masters. Bottom line is, make every effort to step out of the comfort zone and take risks.

Be proactive

Success comes to those who are constantly seeking to move forward. Grad school life is the time where you hustle, seek opportunities, test your limits and come out as a more experienced designer at the other end. In a city like Boston events happen every other day. I would make it a point to attend on-campus events and even go for meetups or exhibitions happening around the city. It is very important as a designer to build a professional network and these events often give that opportunity for you to meet new people. Now with the pandemic and digital events over zoom, I really miss the in-person events happening in the city. If you are not stressed enough everyday, you may not be giving your best to this opportunity that has presented itself in front of you. And of course, I mean healthy stress. You do get stressed when you care about something.

Again, my journey was unique and I tried to make the most of it and I don’t regret one bit. As a designer, you will often find people who will always have a very linear career path and they may not see value in diversifying your skill set. However, designers can very easily become complacent, and comfortable in their day-to-day jobs and should try to seek adventure for their personal goals and professional growth. At the time of this writing, I have started working at PathAI. My responsibilities involve designing AI-powered tools for pathologists to assist in better clinical decisions and patient outcomes. This is another step outside of the comfort zone because I have never worked on such new complexities before. I hope to keep the curiosity to learn alive for as long as I can.